2025-11-19 –, Main Room
The climate crisis poses a severe threat to the natural systems that support modern civilization, disrupting essential cycles that provide freshwater, fertile soils, and stable weather patterns. These disruptions are projected to lead to widespread biodiversity loss and to upset local and global economies. To ensure that the scientific basis of these projections is transparent and credible, researchers globally are increasingly making climate data and models openly available. This openness supports informed decision-making and helps safeguard sustainable development from being compromised by short-term political or economic agendas.
Despite this progress in open science, the broader application of open source software and open data in climate and sustainability-related technologies remains limited. National governments, international organizations, academia, industry, and civil society have all played roles in both contributing to the crisis and proposing solutions. However, fragmented, proprietary approaches persist. Open source offers a powerful alternative—lowering costs, enhancing verifiability, and enabling collaboration across disciplines and sectors.
In this paper, we introduce OpenSustain.tech, the most comprehensive dataset of over 2,500 open source projects directly addressing the climate crisis. We detail the transparent methodology used to curate this collection, including human expert review across multiple fields. We further analyze the network of transitive dependencies among these projects, extending previous work in mapping the climate-focused open source ecosystem.
Finally, we discuss the strategic importance of open source in advancing climate solutions, including its potential economic and societal value. By building shared digital infrastructure, we argue that open source can play a foundational role in climate mitigation, adaptation, and sustainable development.
The climate crisis poses a severe threat to the natural systems that support modern civilization, disrupting essential cycles that provide freshwater, fertile soils, and stable weather patterns. These disruptions are projected to lead to widespread biodiversity loss and to upset local and global economies. To ensure that the scientific basis of these projections is transparent and credible, researchers globally are increasingly making climate data and models openly available, which supports informed decision-making and helps safeguard sustainable development from being compromised by short-term political or economic agendas. Despite this progress, the broader application of open source software and open data in climate and sustainability-related technologies remains limited. National governments, international organizations, academia, industry, and civil society have all played roles in both contributing to the crisis and proposing solutions, and fragmented, proprietary approaches persist.
Open source offers a powerful alternative. This ongoing research seeks to look at the development of OpenSustain.tech, the most comprehensive dataset of over 2,500 open source projects directly addressing the climate crisis. The paper details the transparent methodology used to curate this collection, including human expert review across multiple fields. It further analyzes the network of transitive dependencies among these projects, extending previous work in mapping the climate-focused open source ecosystem. The paper also discusses the strategic importance of open source in advancing climate solutions, including its potential economic and societal value, as well as its foundational role in digital infrastructure for climate mitigation, adaptation, and sustainable development.
Richard Littauer is a PhD student in Computer Science at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington in Pōneke, Aotearoa New Zealand. He is also one of the two organizers of CURIOSS, the community for university and research institution open source program offices, and he is an organizer for SustainOSS, and has recorded hundreds of podcasts on open source sustainability there. He has been interested and involved in open source communities for decades.
Since 2011, Tobias has been accelerating the innovation of sustainable technologies through open-source and open data. With a PhD in Atmospheric Physics and a Master's and Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering, he has worked on various sustainable R&D projects, mainly using open source and open data. He created OpenSustain.tech, ClimateTriage.com and leads the OhMyGrid initiative as Electrical Grid Mapping Lead at Open Energy Transition.